Hi Bob,
Are you still interested in enabling snapcast with volumio? If so, let me tell you a small story;
Many Many moons ago there was an artist called Michaelangelo… NAH!!
Background
For whatever reason I wanted to dabble in Streaming / Multi-Room audio with the express desire to use my Synology NAS as the server / host. I did not intend to use additional hardware. The obvious choices were Icecast and Ices. Because the NAS runs a Linux that is both stripped down and a bit obscure embedded variant (busybox i think), it took me a while to get going.
Once I did get going though , I quickly learnt that I was in the consumer space not the producer space, meaning, I am lazy and just wanted to consume something that was already built that gave me easy access to my music as well as additional stuff like Web-Radio and specialized streaming services like spotify.
That led me to finding Volumio. However, there was a major challenge for me to 1) understand and 2) overcome.
-
Volumio and related ecosystem is primarily built for Raspberry PI and derivatives.
-
Snapcast is excellent for realtime sync for multi-room but how to get Volumio to work with snapcast?
Enter the Plugin
Saiyato has built and maintains a snapcast plugin for Volumio that does exactly this. However, in my case the installation failed because my architecture is identified by the underlying Debian (Volumio runs on) as i686 and despite saiyato’s plugin supporting this architecture (at least according to his install.sh)
elif [ $cpu = “i686” ]; then
# wget $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/badaix/snapcast/releases/latest | grep ‘armhf’ | cut -d" -f4) -P /home/volumio/snapcast
when checking the installation location, I can see that there is no instance of neither the snapcast server nor the client.
The Moolah
So why this longwinded explanation; simply because, while the installation script said all was well, (ok more or less well), I was seeing tons of errors when restarting the service for example after making changes in the Volumio UI. The snapfifo (the file that snapcast uses) was never touched and so on…
So did I make it? Yes, Sir I did. But hold on, lets look at snapserver first or at lest debunk some stuff written above.
There is an Android client snapdroidavailable in Releases and on Google Play
- There is ### no iOS client from BadAix.
- There is however a simple webclient
Given those facts, what you need to ensure is
- The snapserver (RPi1) and snapclients (RPi1 & RPi2) are indeed installed.
- The mpd.conf (mpd is the underlying software Volumio wraps) output section actually contains the section with “type” = “fifo” that outputs to a location like /tmp/snapfifo
audio_output
{
type “fifo”
enabled “yes”
name “”
path “/tmp/snapfifo”
format “480000:16:2”
}
- The target RPi also has the snapclient running.
Finally, use the snapdroid app as a simple way to verify your installation.
and yes, I was able to install the snapcast server inside the volumio on my synology, by first running the plugin, allowing it to succeed / fail and then manually installing the server and client on volumio.
Happy to answer any questions or help if required.
Enjoy!
PS - 2 link limit? WTF?
